August 24, 2018

In yesterday's post we explored the contrasts between two different worlds that complement each other - the artisanal and the industrial - through an exhibition featuring iconic objects designed and manufactured in the 1900s. But there are quite a few young designers out there working along the same lines, producing intriguing pieces and experimenting with rather unusual materials.

The Copenhagen-based Etage Projects gallery currently offers visitors the chance to get to know some of the creations by design duo Kueng Caputo in a dedicated event entitled "Ciao Amico Mio" (kicking off today).

The event at Etage Projects includes recent works by the Swiss design duo comprising Sarah Kueng (1981) and Lovis Caputo (1982), whose practises are united since they were both students of design at the HGKZ Zurich (2004-2008).

Among the pieces on display there are The Silo Furniture and The Homage Carpets: the wooden pieces of furniture in free organic shapes were designed for the Zürich-based bar and restaurant Silosilo, located in a concrete building originally built as a silo for grain.

Fascinated by the work of different weavers in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, Kueng Caputo started studying their designs, and came up with a modern interpretation of their artworks - The Homage Carpets. The rugs look as if they were woven, but they are actually created using EPDM granulate, a material employed for outside sport flooring.

While these pieces have a special tactile quality about them, the Granulate Lamps are instead visually striking: to make them the design duo melted PS-particles in different colours to a sheet and then bent it. When a neon tube is added, the result is a bright refraction of super-colourful lights. The contrast between the standard neon tube and the handmade intricate sheet is the main objective of this project that also hints at the possibility of transforming everyday products into unique artworks.

The colours and consistence of the lamp sheets call to mind transparent slime toys, but there is another event at Etage Projects that will feature pieces that look as if they were made with massive amounts of slime. At the very end of the month the gallery will launch the exhibition "Money makes me ugly, Mickey makes me happy" by Barcelona-based designer and art director Raquel Quevedo (from August 30).

The title reflects a sort of Apollonian Vs Dionysian dichotomy intrinsic to the designer's philosophy: according to Quevedo, money represents industry, doctrines, rules and the impossibility of working without proper financial support; Mickey is instead fantasy, freedom, experimentation and finding happiness in self-expression. The presentation at Etage Project is a celebration of the beauty of imperfect objects and of a spontaneous way of creating design.

Rejecting perfect and polished items, serialisation and refined taste, Quevedo creates a series of design objects camouflaged as artistic sculptures. Quevedo's original aim was recycling left-out materials that kept on piling up in her studio. "I wanted to turn trash into something aesthetically pleasing and visually powerful," she states in a press release. "At the very beginning, I wanted to use those materials to create sculptures that were going to have the shape of various typefaces". Yet Quevedo soon started creating without thinking about what the final result could have been and allowing to the shapes of the objects to freely emerge from her materials.

Quevedo's modus operandi is very artisanal: a sculpture is created by adding on a white base a series of layers of texture and colour, one on top of the other. Rough and crude materials from construction sites are combined together, from fabric and plastic to resin, latex, glue, rocks, inks, plasticine, putty and foams. In some cases the results look like a joyful mess of the type a child may achieve after pouring, wrapping and mixing tons of slime paste on an object.

Quevedo documents the creative process by photographing the various manufacturing stages and changing the shapes and configuration of a piece in front of the camera, making the changes in accordance with what she sees in her photographs. The transformation process on the piece finishes when the artist and designer decides she got a picture that represents it. Through the project Quevedo creates contrasts between the real pieces and their digital alter egos, asking the viewers to wonder which is the more real piece, the physical or the digital one.

Though different one from other, the Etage Projects events by Kueng Caputo and Quevedo do have something in common and that's the way the design duo and the artist experiment with materials, producing a variety of objects and sculptures that, moving from themes such as the artisanal and the industrial, prove visually and tactilely appealing.